Rarely have the demands on ergonomic working been more significant and higher than at present. The pandemic is forcing employees to work from their desks at home and is therefore defining new requirements for an ergonomic workplace. Regardless of whether work is carried out from home or from the usual workplace, whether sitting or standing, in a single office or in conferences - furniture manufacturer Wilkhahn is the right partner for requirements of this kind. Around a year ago, when it was a question of making its internal material flow just as efficient as its own products, the company from Bad Münder in Lower Saxony turned to the conveyor technology manufacturer HaRo from the Sauerland region. The seating furniture was to be transported from the upper floor to the first floor - fully automatically if possible. HaRo design manager Markus Löseke explains the special features of this project: "We have dozens of different items of seating furniture in use at our customer Wilkhahn that need to be transported along the production line. From bar stools to swivel chairs, each piece of furniture has individual contours and turning radii that need to be taken into account for reliable transportation.

Economy and aesthetics combined

Friedrich Hahne and Christian Wilkening founded a chair factory in Eimbeckhausen, southwest of Hanover, back in 1907. Initially, they used wood from the surrounding forests to make chairs from solid beech. A constant stream of new ideas, shapes and materials has allowed the company to grow into a pioneer in German industrial design over the past decades. "Success through design" is the furniture manufacturer's motto. True to the guiding principle "We must build with nature - not against it", aesthetics and economy are given top priority both outside and inside the 8,000 square meter production halls. For some months now, this has also applied to the furnishings inside the halls. The company approached the HaRo Group with its request back in December 2019. Due to the newly acquired production space, the entire storage material was to be moved closer to the production area. In order to implement a new production concept, a suitable transport and packaging concept was required for the transportation of the finished chairs to the shipping department. The project had to combine three objectives: The packaging of various chair models was to be carried out at one workstation, the assembly and cleaning was to be separated from the packaging and carried out by different employees, and finally the finished chairs were to be brought together from different assembly stations and transported via the floor opening of one hall to the first floor of another hall for dispatch. In this project, too, Wilkhahn attached great importance to reducing energy consumption and using environmentally friendly materials.

Safe transportation for every chair

The Rüthen-based specialist for intralogistics solutions, HaRo Anlagen- und Fördertechnik, was ultimately able to meet the defined requirements of its customer with a holistic concept that included a combination of a vertical goods elevator with roller conveyors and chain conveyors. "After carefully checking the radii and contours, we were able to ensure trouble-free transportation of the chairs with very different specifications using a load carrier," says HaRo design manager Markus Löseke. The plates with a metal frame guarantee safe and reliable transportation - from bar stools to swivel chairs - without the high-quality seating furniture rolling or bumping into each other.